The West Begins to Doubt Georgian Leader

[kskiska]

Source: Spiegel Online

By SPIEGEL Staff

Five weeks after the war in the Caucasus the mood is shifting against Georgian President Saakashvili. Some Western intelligence reports have undermined Tbilisi's version of events, and there are now calls on both sides of the Atlantic for an independent investigation.

Hillary Clinton looks tired. It is Tuesday of last week as she sits, exhausted, in the United States Senate. Even her outfit, a beige blazer over a black T-shirt, looks washed out.
Gone is the glamour of the Democratic Convention in Denver, where the party nominated Barack Obama as its presidential candidate, and gone is the dream of her own presidential candidacy in 2008. Instead, it's back to business as usual for Clinton. The Senate Armed Service Committee is in session, discussing the conflict between Russia and its tiny neighbor, Georgia.

Clinton speaks late in the debate. Even her voice sounds tired. But politically she is still her old self, and she cuts right to the chase.

"Did we embolden the Georgians in any way" to use military force? she asks the members of the committee. Did the Bush administration really warn Moscow and Georgia sufficiently about the consequences of a war? And how could it be that the United States was so taken by surprise by this outbreak of hostilities? These questions, says Clinton, should be examined by a US commission, which should "in the first place determine the actual facts."

Although Clinton speaks for only a few minutes, her words show that the mood toward Georgia is shifting in the United States.

Read more: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,578273,00.html

[NC_Nurse]

1. But, I thought we were ALL Georgians now? McLiar said so...

[DirtyDawg]

2. Just the stupid ones....

...headed by the bushbaby that decided that it would be ok to let these guys go get their asses whipped just so McLame could act tough toward the Ruskees. Is there anything that these guys have done that hasn't turned to shit?

[Ghost Dog]

3. Ok. And keep on asking these questions:

Where is the Georgian Opposition?

Who runs the press and TV?

What kind of tin-pot regime is Saakashvili running there (with Bush-Cheney neocon help) anyway?

[tom_paine]

4. Well...DUH! Saakashvili is a Bushie. Which means it is 99% certain he is lying

every time he opens his mouth publicly.

Georgia's Invasion of Ossetia was strictly a Bushie Political Op designed to ratchet fear and, in a marketing/advertising sense, raise nonspecific fear-feelings of a renenwed Cold War.

This has been wildly successful, as McCain almost immediately closed "the gap" as sson as tanks rolled into Ossetia.

[Satyagrahi]

5. Georgian officials continue to contradict themselves

GEORGIA: FLAWS FOUND IN TBILISI’S WAR PLANNING AND OPERATIONS
Giorgi Lomsadze 9/15/08
-snip-

In a series of interviews with EurasiaNet, senior defense and national security officials have repeated earlier assertions that the possibility of a large-scale, direct engagement with Russia was never entertained. Similarly, soldiers who fought in South Ossetia suggest that decisions about Georgian army movements were made on the fly.

At worst, a proxy confrontation with Russian forces -- akin to the first South Ossetian conflict in 1991-1992 -- was considered, said Georgian National Security Council Secretary Alexander Lomaia. After the debacle of Russia’s two wars in Chechnya, no one thought that Moscow would further risk its international reputation by invading a sovereign country, said Deputy Defense Minister Batu Kutelia.

"We expected that the Russians would fight with the hands of the separatists," Lomaia told EurasiaNet.
-snip-

"Our goal was to put an end to fighting in the area and take control," said one senior lieutenant from Georgia’s 3,500-strong 4th Brigade, a unit that bore the brunt of the fighting on August 8. "Nobody in the army expected a war with Russia."

More:
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav091508.shtml

So some Georgian officials claim that the attack was in response to a Russian incursion, but other Georgian officials state that they did not expect a direct confrontation with Russia? That makes no sense whatsoever.

[AlphaCentauri]

7. They did not expect a war with Russia because maybe somebody toll their boss

not to worry about Russia we will take care of them

[Satyagrahi]

8. BTW, that is exactly what Saakashvili's former defense minister claims:

Saakashvili "planned S. Ossetia invasion": ex-minister
Sun Sep 14, 2008
By Brian Rohan

PARIS (Reuters) - Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had long planned a military strike to seize back the breakaway region of South Ossetia but executed it poorly, making it easy for Russia to retaliate, Saakashvili's former defence minister said.

Irakly Okruashvili, Georgia's leading political exile, said in a weekend interview in Paris that the United States was partly to blame for the war, having failed to check the ambitions of what he called a man with democratic failings.
-snip-

"The original plans called for a two-pronged operation entering South Ossetia, taking Tskhinvali, the Roki Tunnel and Java," he said, referring respectively to the regional capital, the main border crossing between Russia and the rebel region, and another key town.

"Saakashvili's offensive only aimed at taking Tskhinvali, because he thought the U.S. would block a Russian reaction through diplomatic channels."

More:
http://www.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=USLD12378020080914

[alcibiades_mystery]

6. Saakashvili is a neocon tool

The fact that he's a crazy dictatorial motherfucker is beside the point.

[Satyagrahi]

9. Odd.

Some things don't add up in this New York Times article:

1.

Georgia claims that its main evidence — two of several calls secretly recorded by its intelligence service on Aug. 7 and 8 (sic) — shows that Russian tanks and fighting vehicles were already passing through the Roki Tunnel linking Russia to South Ossetia before dawn on Aug. 7.

-snip-

Georgia said its main evidence consisted of two conversations on Aug. 7 between Mr. Gassiev at the tunnel and his supervisor at the headquarters.
In the first conversation, logged at 3.41 a.m., Mr. Gassiev told the supervisor that a Russian colonel had asked Ossetian guards to inspect military vehicles that “crowded” the tunnel.

-snip-

Georgia’s claims about Russian movements appear to be at least partly supported by other information that emerged recently. Western intelligence determined independently that two battalions of the 135th Regiment moved through the tunnel to South Ossetia either on the night of Aug. 7 or the early morning of Aug. 8, according to a senior American official.

New Western intelligence also emerged last week showing that a motorized rifle element was assigned to a garrison just outside South Ossetia, on Russian territory, with the aim of securing the north end of the tunnel, and that it may have moved to secure the entire tunnel either on the night of Aug. 7 or early in the morning of Aug. 8, according to several American officials who were briefed on the findings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/world/europe/16georgia.html?_r=2&em=&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

The "night of Aug. 7 or early ... morning of Aug. 8" is almost 24 hours after the early morning of Aug. 7 ("3.41 a.m."), so HOW ON EARTH can the New York Times say that Georgia’s claims are at least partly (!) supported by new intelligence? "Partly" as in "24 hours later"?

2.

From the same article:

Vano Merabishvili, Georgia’s minister of interior, said he was told of the intercepts by Georgian intelligence within hours of their being recorded. The information, he said, was relayed to Mr. Saakashvili, who saw them as a sign of a Russian invasion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/world/europe/16georgia.html?_r=2&em=&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

The problem is that this seems to contradict what Georgian officials told the Washington Post on August 17:

At 7 p.m., with troops on the march, Saakashvili went on national television and declared a unilateral cease-fire. "We offer all of you partnership and friendship," he said to the South Ossetians. "We are ready for any sort of agreement in the interest of peace."
-snip-

"From 18:00, Georgian troops from inner districts are relocated to the area" near the South Ossetian border, Anatoly Nogovitsyn, a colonel-general on the Russian General Staff, told reporters in Moscow at a retrospective briefing. "More than 20 armored units arrive."

Kezerashvili said that around the same time, Georgians were receiving intelligence reports suggesting that Russian troops were gearing up to move south through the Roki Tunnel. Russia denies any such muster.

In a series of phone calls, Saakashvili contacted Western and NATO leaders and diplomats. "I started to call frantically," he said in an interview with foreign journalists.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/16/AR2008081600502_pf.html

7 p.m. is almost 15 hours after the calls were allegedly recorded. Are we really expected to believe that it took 15 hours to inform the president that Russian troops had entered Georgian territory?

And what happened to those troops? South Ossetia is very small. Why did they not participate in the defense of Tskhinvali?

[lanlady]

10. Georgia aspires to be--

--the Israel of the Transcaucasus, getting lots of US support and cash no matter what it does.